A glimpse into 3D desktops…

April 15, 2007 — Nikesh

3D vs 3D desktop environments. Below is a great explanation of the offering of both flavors; Red Hat and Novell.

I’ve been talking about them, complaining about what you CAN’T do, about the troubles with 3D cards… Personally I’m getting a bit lost with all this. So, I’ve decided to compile all the information I could find out about those pesky 3D desktops.

Comments required.A “what is” guide to 3D desktopsXGLEssentially developed by Novell for SuSE and the first “elegant” 3D desktop, it came out with Compiz, a window manager that can replace Gnome’s (and now KDE’s and others) window manager. Allowing desktop rotations, window transparencies and deformations, it is nice-looking, fluid and can run on hardware more than five years old.In short, if your existing X configuration supports somewhat advanced 3D acceleration and DRI, you can run XGL: it will start your normal X, ask it to draw a single, full-screen OpenGL window in which a simple new X server runs… Source: Free Software Mag